Comments on novel opening please?

April 12, 1951

The man was suspicious. Theo Dawson gave him what he hoped to be a reassuring smile. But his face was lined with the evidence of war. It was in his gaze, the steel of it. He couldn’t just shake it off the way you got rid of cobweb on your fingers. He held his thumb up, banking on the fog to conceal the fact that it was shaking. The car slowed down. The driver took a better look and sped up. The tires spun against the curve.

Theo tidied himself up. He finger combed his black hair with swift light brushes up against his scalp, tucked in his shirt, and swept the dirt off his pants and brogans. He stroked his chin and cringed at the shaggy beard that had grown there.

He thought of how much Liz would’ve hated it. “It ages you overnight,” she’d said to him once, her eyes gone wide and dark as though she’d believed she lost him. “Like you’ve gone to war and back again.” He’d never grown so much as a stubble after that. But a lot had happened since and you were fooling yourself if you didn’t believe you’d lose everything somewhere down the line.

Theo strode several yards north along a cornfield, the heavy clouds weighing down on him. The road was quiet, the air cold and clammy like a dank cellar. A musty odor wafted from decaying corns and wet plants. The fog bleached the night sky.

He slung his head over his shoulder every now and then, checked to make sure no one had followed him at Rockcastle. He froze when he heard the humming of a car engine, waited a few seconds just to make sure, and held up his hand when he saw lights.

An old yellow truck slid around the corner. Theo ran up to the passenger’s door. The driver rolled down the window halfway through. He was a fat man with small eyes wearing a loose-fitting baseball cap that read Gunsmoke. The driver squinted at him. “Where you heading?”

Theo’s mind went blank. Then, “Up North,” he said, “on Park Ave and Main St by the Westminster Dog Park.”

The driver gauged him, then leaned over to look past him. “You got any partners?”

“No,” Theo said.

“What you doing down here all by yourself?”

Theo wanted to blurt out at the top of his lungs: “They’re after me!” But that would’ve raised too much suspicion and more questions, likely costing him the ride. He wouldn’t have normally hitchhiked nor would he ever pick up a stranger off the curve, even a beautiful girl. It asked you to put too much faith in other people. But time was running out, circumstances changing. Theo waved his arm showing a direction across the pinewoods, way beyond the cornfield.

“I filled in a day’s work in the farmhouse at the foot of the hill,” he said, his voice clear and composed. “Lost track of the road ahead with the mist and all. I’ve been strolling around for hours and missed the bus home.” It was a lie, and he was good at it. But he lied only strategically, when necessary, like in the war.

Like when Salvador was hit back in the mountains, the cavalry barracks eight miles away. Theo had never truly known what a speck of hope can do to a man until he’d carried Salvador on his back, the man mumbling his daughter’s name with every stride like a mantra. Sarah… Sarah… Sarah… Sarah… “You’ll meet her at the camp,” Theo had said, not wanting his partner to die on him, a little bit because he didn’t want to be alone, but also because Salvador had been worth it at the time. Salvador sighed deeply. He mumbled. “I’m gonna meet her. I’m gonna meet my daughter at the camp…” “Yes,” Theo replied, his pace slowing down with every footprint in the thickening snow. “You say it enough and soon we’ll be there.”

“It’s some nasty weather, isn’t it?” the driver said.

“Yes sir, it is—” Theo said.